- Title Pages
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction Into the Wildness
- 1 Wildfire News
- 2 Conundrum and Continuum
- 3 No Word
- 4 The Edge of Anomaly
- 5 Order versus Wildness
- 6 Biomimicry
- 7 Notes on “Up at the Basin”
- 8 Listening to the Forest
- 9 The Working Wilderness
- 10 The Hummingbird and the Red Cap
- 11 Losing Wildness for the Sake of Wilderness
- 12 Inhabiting the Alaskan Wild
- 13 Wilderness in Four Parts, or Why We Cannot Mention My Great-Grandfather’s Name
- 14 Wild Black Margins
- 15 Healing the Urban Wild
- 16 Building the Civilized Wild
- 17 Cultivating the Wild on Chicago’s South Side
- 18 Toward an Urban Practice of the Wild
- 19 The Whiskered God of Filth
- 20 The Akiing Ethic
- 21 On the Wild Edge in Iceland
- 22 The Story Isn’t Over
- 23 Cultivating the Wild
- 24 Earth Island
- Epilogue Wild Partnership
- Permissions
- About the Contributors
- Index
On the Wild Edge in Iceland
On the Wild Edge in Iceland
- Chapter:
- (p.205) 21 On the Wild Edge in Iceland
- Source:
- Wildness
- Author(s):
Brooke Hecht
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
This chapter explores what happens when we look at the concept of wildness through the lens of ecosystem ecology, sharing the author’s journey through three woodland sites at the forest limit in Iceland. The forest limit (or treeline) is a place that might span a few steps, a place where you could throw a small stone through an ecological doorway—with you standing in forest, the stone landing in tundra. These mysterious threshold zones hold clues to what makes a forest a forest, and what causes a forest to reach a breaking point and give way to tundra. How might we understand ecosystem loss—or ecosystem resilience—if we look to the landscape itself to tell us its stories? This chapter explores one way of reading landscapes, which, in turn, may help us pull back from ecological breaking points we now face.
Keywords: ecosystem ecology, ecosystem resilience, Iceland, treeline, forest limit, threshold zone
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- Title Pages
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction Into the Wildness
- 1 Wildfire News
- 2 Conundrum and Continuum
- 3 No Word
- 4 The Edge of Anomaly
- 5 Order versus Wildness
- 6 Biomimicry
- 7 Notes on “Up at the Basin”
- 8 Listening to the Forest
- 9 The Working Wilderness
- 10 The Hummingbird and the Red Cap
- 11 Losing Wildness for the Sake of Wilderness
- 12 Inhabiting the Alaskan Wild
- 13 Wilderness in Four Parts, or Why We Cannot Mention My Great-Grandfather’s Name
- 14 Wild Black Margins
- 15 Healing the Urban Wild
- 16 Building the Civilized Wild
- 17 Cultivating the Wild on Chicago’s South Side
- 18 Toward an Urban Practice of the Wild
- 19 The Whiskered God of Filth
- 20 The Akiing Ethic
- 21 On the Wild Edge in Iceland
- 22 The Story Isn’t Over
- 23 Cultivating the Wild
- 24 Earth Island
- Epilogue Wild Partnership
- Permissions
- About the Contributors
- Index
